But the surprising thing, even to Hamilton, was that network availability went up, not down. I'm not sure why that was a surprise, KISS, applies just as well

But the surprising thing, even to Hamilton, was that network availability went up, not down. I'm not sure why that was a surprise, KISS, applies just as well to networking as most other parts of the data center. Networking, and storage (to a lesser extent) seem to have enterpriseits. By that, I mean the companies involved in it do everything in their power to maintain their high margins. One of the ways they do this is adding features that everyone just has to have (or so sales will tell you). Even when many of those features are things that should _NEVER_ be actually used in practice, due to their affects on performance or reliability (take WAN accelerators for example, otherwise known as how to make your network appear faster 90% of the time and completely non functional for the remaining). What I really wish is that the amazon's, microsofts, googles, facebooks, etc would get together and actually release these switches/etc they are building. While I imagine they never will because they view it as a competitive advantage. It sure would be nice to have some of this stuff available for medium sized data centers without having to spend $$$$$ with the established vendors just to get something that can do 100Gbit.